Veeam Software announced a strategic partnership with Sophos. Through the partnership, Veeam Data Platform will integrate with Sophos Managed Detection and Response (MDR), adding a critical layer of human-led threat detection and response to advance the security of business-critical backups against ransomware attackers who attempt to manipulate, delete or change the customers backup environment as a tactic in their overall attack chain to increase pressure on victims to pay the ransom. 

Together, Veeam and Sophos technologies vigilantly detect cybersecurity threats, determine the warranted response and rapidly recover impacted data, providing organizations peace of mind knowing their data is always available and easily recoverable. 

“The growing threat of cyberattacks can only be addressed by companies coming together to offer customers more complete and integrated protection,” said Danny Allan, CTO at Veeam. “Combining the #1 global leader in data protection and ransomware recovery with the #1 MDR offering provides customers with the most comprehensive cybersecurity protection and recovery on the market today. Keeping businesses running, no matter what happens, is central to Veeam’s overall mission, and by uniting with Sophos to create an end-to-end approach, we take another step in protecting customers from bad actors by strengthening their overall security posture and enabling radical resilience.” 

Veeam Data Platform monitors an organization’s environment to detect potential threats against customers’ production workloads and their backup environment. Should a threat be identified, such as an attacker attempting to tamper with backups, Veeam sends an alert to Sophos MDR—a fully-managed threat hunting, detection and response service that provides a dedicated 24/7 security team that rapidly identifies and neutralizes complex attacks, including ransomware, network breaches, hands-on keyboard adversaries, and more. The Sophos MDR security operations team can determine if an attack is occurring and take actions to disrupt, contain and fully-eliminate the attacker. 

“Active adversaries are remarkably adept at evolving their tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), often outpacing the detection capabilities of many organizations, as evidenced by Sophos X-Ops threat intelligence. The need for secure backups is paramount, and always-on security operations is imperative in fortifying this business-critical data,” said Marty Ward, Vice President of Technology Operations at Sophos. “Sophos MDR is the most widely used MDR offering with more than 19,000 customers worldwide, and we look forward to extending this urgently needed offering to organizations using Veeam. Together, we’re keeping organizations running securely.” 

Additional key benefits of this strategic partnership include: 

● Defending Against Ransomware: Advanced threat detection and prevention capabilities from Sophos, with immutable backups and versioning provided by Veeam, ensure backup data remains secure and recoverable. 

● Improving Threat Response Time: Sophos MDR security operations specialists execute immediate response actions to stop confirmed threats with an industry-leading average response time of 38 minutes—96% faster than the industry benchmark. 

● Identifying Internal Security Threats: Comprehensive monitoring of internal and external threats like malware detect unauthorized or suspicious activity that could compromise backup data. 

● Preventing Accidental Deletion: Backup versioning, audit trails, and immutable storage options safeguard backup data against unintentional actions. 

● Maintaining Compliance: Robust data protection and security features can help organizations meet regulatory compliance requirements such as GDPR, HIPAA, and other industry-specific regulations. 

● Satisfying Cyber Insurance Requirements: Sophos MDR helps satisfy critical cyber insurance requirements, like having 24/7 threat monitoring—reducing the likelihood of a claim denial and helping organizations get better premiums. 

This Veeam Data Platform and Sophos MDR integration is expected to be available later this year.